By Lee Hyo-won
Staff Reporter
"Yasukuni" explores the heated issue of the Japanese recollection of war and militarism, but Chinese director
Ying Li refrains from overt politicization and ventures instead into aesthetically experimental, and essentially spiritual, territory.
Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, meaning "peaceful country", is where some 2.5 million soldiers who have died for the country since the Meiji Restoration in 1868 are enshrined, including 14 convicted Class-A war criminals. Many Asian governments, particularly those of South Korea, China and Taiwan, regard the memorial as a glorified relic of Japanese imperialism and atrocities committed in the name of the emperor.
Yasukuni is the first film to feature the memorial, and the Japan-China-South Korea joint production toured the festival circuit, including the Sundance, Berlinale and Hong Kong events after premiering in 2007 at the Pusan International Film Festival. Though almost banned in Japan, the film, despite art house tendencies and touchy content, opened last year and rewrote Japanese box office history for documentaries.
Unlike films like "Annyong Sayonara" that protest on behalf of "victims" ― namely Korean or Chinese ― against the Yasukuni and what it represents, it offers a multidimensional look into the contested sentiments surrounding the Japanese memorial.
Shot over a 10-year period, the film presents without narration various occurrences: right-wing rituals held every year on Aug. 15, the "tragic" day of Japanese surrender (which is commemorated in Korea the "festive" Liberation Day); the case of two young "Chinese" men who violently oppose former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits (they actually turn out to be Japanese); the war bereaved ― including Chinese, Koreans and Japanese ― that protest the interment of their deceased family members at the memorial. Also included is a strange American who supports the hero worship of the shrine and a snippet of Koizumi's self-defense speech, as well as revisionists who claim that the Rape of Nanking never happened.
In short, every party captured in the film has a perspective of its own. The shaky camerawork offers both a distanced observation of the events and dangerously close involvement with the people. A man taking part in a parade asks the camera to step back while seemingly rational people display explosive emotional fits.
But the film is not overtly laissez-faire.
The shots are interweaved with a series of interviews with Naoji Kariya, a 90-year-old master swordsmith who helped craft thousands of Yasukuni Swords. It is believed that the spirit of dead soldiers resides in the swords, which is thus the physical and spiritual embodiment of Yasukuni.
Instead of providing commentary, the director makes use of archival material: Kariya seems aware of Japan's historic culpability ― it was no secret that officers made a game of beheading prisoners with swords. But when gently questioned by Li if he gave thought to how the swords he made were being used, Kariya distances art from real-world application.
Here, the documentary becomes layered as Li finds his voice in the silence of Kariya. He seems to suggest that still waters may run deep, but are bound to putrefy in perverse purity and adamant refusal to change.
The film documents societal disorder, and
Ying Li, who said he had no knowledge about the shrine when he started filming, takes viewers on a very frank attempt to understand the subject matter.
The film ultimately staggers away from political provocation and leaps over the confines of time and space ― one is left to think about the painful remnants of war and the imperfection of human memory. Yasukuni is not a specimen of the past but a multiple-edged sword that cuts through the past, present and future.
Now showing in theaters. In Japanese and some Chinese with Korean subtitles. Distributed by Silver Spoon.
